Environmental initiatives are hardly thin on the ground at the moment but when the managing director of an Isle of Man company that aims to reduce food waste tells you that his stated intention is to win an Earthshot Prize next year, you know that this is serious.

Mike Osborne, along with his son Ashley are the founders of Gander, an app which shows consumers all the food that is about to go out of date - the reduced price products with yellow stickers - in their nearby stores.

Mike explains: ‘Gander is a world first invention based on a simple idea. Food accounts for around 10% of the world’s C02 and Gander is already saving millions of meals annually. One of our aims is to win the 2023 Earthshot prize, an accolade which would bring instant recognition not only to Gander but to the Isle of Man with its focus on biodiversity.’

Gander was formed out of an idea that Ashley Osborne had while working at law firm, Allen and Overy, in the City of London.

Mike says: ‘He would go home after work late, as young lawyers do, and see acres of ‘yellow labels’ on reduced to clear food in various supermarkets. But unless you went into the store, you never knew that those reductions existed.

‘With the basic concept of the creation of a B2C (Business to Consumer) product driver and consumer information driven in ‘real time’, we set about finding a way of reading that simple barcode which sits on most reduced to clear products.

‘During that tech discovery period Gander was led down and followed some wrong roads with both Pret’s and Greggs telling us that if Gander added more than a millisecond onto their till time then they were not interested.

‘Finally, Gander had that Eureka moment: real time reduced to clear food.’

This is a genuine ‘what’s not to like?’ concept as it seems to offer something for everybody. Consumers can save money, retailers can mitigate the profit-eroding effects of food waste, and the planet benefits because less food waste means a reduction in CO2 emissions.

Sanchia Newman is Gander’s International Spar sales and South African facillitator, based at the company’s headquarters at the Freeport.

She explains exactly how it works when a retailer is signed up to the app.

She says: ‘Gander integrates with their EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) system: they have a handheld device and when food is going out of date they will scan it and a new bar code is presented and printed and they put it onto the food. When that is printed it automatically comes onto the Gander app in real time so people can see what yellow sticker food items there are and how many are left. And when someone buys an item at the till it goes straight off the Gander app.’

All the Shoprite stores on the island are using the app and obviously they will each have different yellow label items so you can choose the store nearest to you to discover exactly what is available. You can also search for a specific food or select a preference such as dairy-free.

Including Shoprite there are a total of 11 supermarket groups signed up to Gander – 525 stores in all, each paying a monthly subscription to the company.

Spar International, which represents the Spar brand in 48 countries, have chosen Gander as one of their three ‘voices for waste’. The other two are apps with a similar aim: WhyWaste, an algorithm company, which works out best food prices overall, pre expiry, and Too Good To Go, which takes any unsold products at day end and places them in a ‘Magic Bag’ of 10 items of food at a set price for consumer collection. Gander is the only one which adds individual products in real time to give consumers the best choice.

Given that the November’s inflation figures for the Isle of Man,showed that ‘food and non-alcoholic beverages’, had contributed 12.7% to the overall Consumer Price Index, with prices rising 1.6% on the previous month we should probably all be downloading the Gander app - which is free - and looking for bargains.

We should also, definitely, be helping to prevent food waste.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is a charity which is aiming a world in which all resources can be used sustainably.

They have produced a food waste hierachy, a graph which illustrates the best waste management options with respect to their environmental impact. Sitting at the top is Prevention, the most preferable option, where food is sold and consumed before it becomes waste, and this is exactly what Gander is trying to achieve.

At the very bottom of the graph is disposal, where food is thrown away and goes into landfill and that it is definitely not good because landfill creates C02 which, as we all know, causes global warming.

Sanchia says: ‘More than 20 million food items have been saved at the moment across the stores using Gander, which equates to preventing 21,000 tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, so hopefully we can just continue growing that number.

‘The Gander technology provides retailers and consumers with a perfect solution to escalating grocery bills, and our retail partners are seeing significant improvements in sell-through rates of marked down goods; whilst shoppers who engage with the app are seeing an average saving of 56% on their weekly food shop.’